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Wolf Creek
Rated R for strong gruesome violence, and for language;
Although it claims, as so many movies today do, to be based on a true story, it is so baldly exploitative that it cannot be justified as a cautionary film.
Besides, after hundreds of slasher/horror films from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to "The Blair Witch Project," the folks who might be warned off idiotic behavior mustn't be paying attention anyway.
The film's first half all but bores us into catatonia.
British tourists Kristy (Kestie Morassi) and the marginally brighter Liz (Cassandra Magrath) already have hooked up with Sydney-based surfer Ben (Nathan Phillips) when we join them.
He buys a used station wagon so the three can tool around Australia for three weeks boozing, sleeping outdoors and behaving like the carefree teens and 20-somethings in every "Friday the 13th" ripoff of the past quarter century.
When their car breaks down in Wolf Creek National Park under suspicious circumstances they never acknowledge, they accept the help of Mick (John Jarratt), a hardy bloke with mechanical skills who volunteers to tow them miles in the wrong direction and to repair their vehicle overnight.
Whatever their intemperate behavior earlier, they haven't earned the grueling torture and dismemberment that follows in doses that sicken.
That "Wolf Creek" is sloppily made is merely doubles the pain.
Then, too, you have to factor in that the women behave with a stupidity uncommon even by the dumbed-down standards of characters in such movies. There has to be a middle zone of rational human behavior somewhere between super-heroine gymnastics and the sheer nitwittery exhibited here.
